BBC tech reporting needs a slap
Another slice of fried gold (smeared in shit, sadly) from the BBC in iPhone 4 signal fault leaves Apple ‘stunned’. What left me more stunned is how, once again, the BBC’s reporting is little better than copy-and-paste blogging, although they let someone else bang the same old drum about iPhone 4 ‘problems’ rather than bothering to do any actual reporting themselves.
In the report, Pocket Lint’s Stuart Miles says Apple raises questions about the iPhone 4: “Why, for the first time, has Apple released a bumper for their phone, and why does no one else have this problem?” My question: why doesn’t the editor of Pocket Lint (and a BBC reporter) not only know that every phone suffers from human-oriented antenna interference, and that some companies even note this in their instruction manuals? Maybe they should have asked the guys from AnandTech to comment instead—at least they know what they’re talking about regarding iPhone 4.
Would that be the Anandtech guys who said:
“The drop in signal from holding the phone with your left hand arguably remains a problem. Changing the bars visualization may indeed help mask it, and to be fair the phone works fine all the way down to -113 dBm, but it will persist – software updates can change physics as much as they can change hardware design. At the end of the day, Apple should add an insulative coating to the stainless steel band, or subsidize bumper cases. It’s that simple.”
Which pretty much agrees with the BBC reporting that there is a problem in the physical design which goes beyond the usual hand-held attenuation factor?
There’s a big difference between what they did (a measured, considered response) and saying no other devices suffer from the problem.
Yes, and there’s also a big difference between their position (“Apple should … subsidize bumper cases”) and yours (“every phone suffers from human-oriented antenna interference”, with no mention that the effect is approximately thirty times worse on an uncased iPhone 4 than on an uncased Nexus One.). Which is why I thought it odd that you quoted them as a citation for your post.
My problem with the BBC report is, like most of its tech reporting of late, it lacks balance. The quote they used suggests the problem is isolated to iPhone 4, and that nothing else suffers from the same problem.
But that’s my point, and Anandtech’s as well. No other phones suffer from the barehanded holding problem, because no other phones have revolutionary external antennas. Anandtech shows within-error equivalent signal drop on Nexus One both inside and outside a case. They show much worse drop on the iPhone inside and outside a case. That problem is unique to the iPhone 4. The other factor isn’t a problem at all, it’s just how phones work.